At the risk of positing a strawman, sometimes it feels like Wall Street strategists and just market observers in general are pathologically averse to the notion that the world might be reassessing the investment case for US assets.

That might sound strange given how much mainstream financial media coverage that (alleged) reassessment gets during a given week, but bear in mind: The media covers narratives that generate web traffic. So, every time an analyst pitches some version of the “sell America” story, you hear about it on Bloomberg. What you don’t hear are the voices downplaying “sell America” or otherwise suggesting it’s a canard.

Suffice to say not everyone on Wall Street’s buying the shift narrative. Indeed, even some analysts who called for a rotation headed into 2025 seem reluctant to say “I told you so” because that’d mean acknowledging, tacitly, that the Trump administration’s penchant for erratic, norm-breaking behavior (both in terms of domestic politics and geo-strategy) is behind the nascent shift away from US assets.

Note the adjective: Nascent. Hyperbolizing aside (and I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to “sell America” market hyperbole), no one’s seriously suggesting that global investors are in the process of unloading the entirety of their US stocks and bonds in favor of — I don’t know — Japanese equities and euro fixed income.

Relatedly, no one’s arguing that investors across the developed world are excited about being compelled to diversify away from US assets. In fact, it’s the opposite: America’s allies are aghast at what goes on in Washington on some days and they wake up every morning wishing Trump would behave not necessarily “like a normal US president,” so to speak, but just in a way that suggests he understands how hard he makes it for the Western world to give him the benefit of the doubt.

With that in mind, the latest flows update from EPFR showed US equity-focused ETFs and mutual funds shed another $10 billion (on net) over the latest weekly reporting period.

As the figure shows, it was the fourth weekly outflow in a row, the eighth in nine and the tenth in twelve.

I don’t want to be abrasive about this, and I’m not trying to make a political statement, but… well, let me put it as a question: Does it still make sense to extrapolate the YTD net inflow to US equity funds out to the full year given 10 outflows in a dozen weeks? Maybe. But you’d be forgiven for suggesting otherwise.

Notwithstanding the fact that US shares are prone to “chunky” one-week inflows (e.g., on big dip-buying when there’s a meaningful swoon) which can offset weeks of leakage in one fell swoop, the trend’s not your friend here.

And yet, week after week, we hear the same quasi-pushback which can be roughly summarized as follows: “Yeah, whatever, but the world’s still hugely — bigly — Overweight the US.” That’s obviously true, but what isn’t obvious is how that invalidates the assertion that global investors are beginning to rethink their collective Overweight.

In his latest, BofA’s Michael Hartnett tossed out a compendium of large numbers. So far in the 2020s, US assets have seen $2.6 trillion of inflows, and 2025’s annualizing the third-largest inflow on record, he said, pointing to the figure on the left, below.

As for foreign buying specifically, it’s robust in the 2020s, adding up to nearly $550 billion, Hartnett went on, noting that if you annualize 2025’s foreign investor inflows, you’re left to ponder a near $140 billion annual haul, almost all of which would be accounted for by flows to US stocks.

He wasn’t done. US equities enjoyed $1.3 trillion of inflows decade-to-date, $350 billion of which came courtesy of foreign buyers. And on and on.

Hartnett did concede that America’s “monopolization of global equity inflows” abated this year, falling to “just” seven out of every 10 dollars from nearly nine last year. But his overarching message was this: “Saying investors are Underweight US assets is like saying the runner-up at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest is Underweight hot dogs — he’s not Underweight, he’s just eaten 60 dogs in 10 minutes.”

I take the point, but if you ask me, that’s the best argument of all for why this nascent rotation has room to continue. Whether it becomes an epochal shift is the real question.